INCORPORING CSR GROUP WIDE

Sustainable Development Department is in charge of coordination of awareness as to CSR within the Group

CSR Organisation and structure

In order to ensure a coherent Corporate and Social Responsibility (CSR) strategy group wide as well as its effective deployment across the bank's different business lines, Société Générale has set up a transverse structure to ensure the integrated management of the Group's sustainable development priorities and challenges.
This structure is headed up by the Executive Committee which defines the company's strategic objectives in terms of CSR and validates the various action plans to be implemented throughout the Group. Under the supervision of Société Générale's General Management via the Group's Corporate Secretary, the Sustainable Development Department itself consists of five managers that are in charge of the animation and coordination of all sustainable development initiatives and issues. These managers are able to draw upon:
  • a network of around sixty contributors within each Société Générale business line whose role is to relay the Group's policy in the field,
  • supervisory committees made up of business line, division, function and corporate department managers depending on the project in question. The remit of these committees is to oversee the effective implementation of CSR processes and the group wide promotion of best practices in order to ensure that CSR priorities and issues are effectively factored into the strategy of each of the Group’s businesses.
To help the concrete implementation of its policy, the Sustainable Development Department provides its network of contributors with a number of innovative tools, including e-learning training modules tailored to each business line and a self-appraisal tool (RPS - Responsibility Performance Survey). Tried and tested by several teams, these resources have successfully heightened staff awareness of the importance of corporate and social responsibility and generated stronger synergies and closer teamwork. The training modules are available to all employees and the self-appraisal tool will be rolled out group wide in 2010.

In October 2009, a new "CSR Communications Charter" was sent out to 600 members of staff working in the Group's different communications departments to not only ensure a consistent discourse both within and outside of Société Générale, but also to prevent any "greenwashing".
Highlighting just some of the Group's core principles and values (transparency, modesty, reliability, etc.), the Charter lists the different example materials to which staff should refer (messages and media) as well as outlining the validation process for messages.
The CSR Department at Société Générale also oversees a number of other key initiatives: responsible financing and sector policies (Finethic) within the Group's Corporate and Investment Banking arm, environmental policy (Carbon Plan, Green-IT, responsible building benchmark standards, responsible paper guide), etc.